How in the course of little over a year he went from writing The Merry Wives of Windsor to writing a play as inspired as Hamlet

This work, then, grew out of frustration with how much I didn’t know and frustration with scholars of all critical denominations who never quite got around to addressing the question I found most pressing: how, at age thirty-five, Shakespeare went from being an exceptionally talented writer to being one of the greatest who ever lived – put another way: how in the course of little over a year he went from writing The Merry Wives of Windsor to writing a play as inspired as Hamlet.

J. Shapiro, 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare (2005), loc. 152